SANTA FE (AP) – Republicans who gathered outside the Capitol on Valentine’s Day to promote marriage and family found an uninvited but attentive audience: same-sex marriage activists.

As GOP lawmakers extolled the virtues of marriage and offered legislation aimed at keeping marriages intact, a voice shouted out from the sign-toting crowd:

“We ought to be allowed to get married.”

Same-sex marriage is at the center of one of the hottest debates of this year’s legislative session.

So-called defense of marriage bills promoted by Republican legislators would outlaw same-sex unions, defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Gay rights advocates – while trying to defeat those measures – are pushing domestic partnership legislation that would allow same-sex couples to register and get the state-issued benefits of marriage.

The hundreds of activists who rallied at the Capitol included a lesbian couple about to celebrate their first wedding anniversary.

Norma Vasquez and Mary Houdek of Rio Rancho were among more than 60 same-sex couples Sandoval County Clerk Victoria Dunlap issued marriage licenses to on Feb. 20, 2004, before Attorney General Patricia Madrid said they were illegal.

“Those marriages… take nothing away from anybody else’s marriage in New Mexico,” Houdek told the crowd in the Capitol rotunda.

She decried the marriage-definition legislation as discriminatory and anti-family.

According to the 2000 census, one in three lesbian households in New Mexico and one in four gay male households had children under 18 living at home, the advocates said.

“Our families are just being abandoned and just being told we don’t count,” said Mary Ellen Capek, chair of the board of the Equality New Mexico Foundation.

Republicans, meanwhile, rolled out a package of bills they said would strengthen marriages and families.

Sen. Mark Boitano of Albuquerque said they were aimed at two “raging epidemics” in the state: “non-parented or under-parented children” and “throwaway marriages.”

“More and more children are spending less and less time with their biological parents,” he said, citing the increasing numbers of children born to unmarried mothers.”

The package of bills include:

-A reduction in the $25 marriage license fee for couples who take marriage education programs.

-A requirement that 10 percent of federal welfare funds received by the state would be used to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.

-An appropriation of $200,000 to community and faith-based organizations for a range of educational programs, including advertising campaigns on the value of marriage.

-A requirement that divorcing couples who have children, or divorcing couples in which one party doesn’t want a divorce, get pre-divorce education and counseling.